Scumsoft Software and Elmo Pug, the fat dude that walked around whipping the programmers. Scumsoft Software was of course Sierra On-Line, and Elmo Pug was Ken Williams. They did get away with it, Ken Williams approved :D
Haha, I remember this with Leisure Suit Larry 1. When you knock on the door at Lefty's Bar, a guy opens a hatch in the door and asks "What's the password?". Then you need to type "ken sent me" and press enter. I was 7-8 years old at the time, and it was hard for me to type "ken sent me" in the 5 or 10 seconds you have to give him the password. Sometimes I asked my dad to help me out, so he could write it for me hehe. But we found a trick after a while, you could just set the game to SLOWEST at that part, and you had much more time to enter the password. Good times!
Huh, I was pretty sure that it was out while I was in high school so before 1986, but I guess that must have been some other adult video game paving the way for LSL.
Maybe you were thinking of Softporn Adventure from 1981. It's a text adventure game by Sierra (at the time they were called On-Line Systems), and Leisure Suit Larry 1 is a graphical adaption of it. Source Wikipedia.
I'll add Angband to the list. A hack-and-slash roguelike. 1 town, 100 dungeon levels, kill Morgoth and win the game. Diablo 1 was heavily inspired by this game (and Moria).
Artifacts, ego types, and most normal objects have to pass a depth check before being generated. But nothing in the game has a depth below 100, so there would be no difference between 100 and 200 from that perspective.
It might be easier to find weapons with higher +to_hit and +to_dam values, or armor with higher +ac, but that would be unlikely to matter much, because you'd be using artifacts anyway.
I don't know if rings of speed take dungeon depth into account. Most other types of bonuses in the game are capped. (e.g. a Ring of Constitution +6 is as good as Rings of Constitution get.)
Angband is great, and was great to find after having played Moria on and off for a few years. The game that really caught me was one of its variants — Zangband. Not because of the Zelazny connections, but because of the sheer size of the gameworld and everything that could be found in it. It hasn't, however, apparently been updated since the mid-aughts.
Same, Asphyxia tutorials were considered very good back in the day for democoding in x86 asm. I think they were included in "Programmer's Heaven", a CD full of (obviously) programming guides, tutorials and technical manuals https://archive.org/details/Programmers_Heaven_InfoMagic_Mar...
Check out Lex Fridman and John Carmack interview. Also read Masters of Doom. I think the key with Carmack is that he's a workaholic, and he expects the same from the ones around him.
Nice article, I remember the thrill of calling new bbs' back then. Especially the elite-bbs' and getting hold of the NUP (new user password). This is also where my love of ascii-/ansiart started. And lets not forget door-games. Legend of the Red Dragon anyone? :) Those were the days.
